by W. Eric Martin

Ready to storm the exhibit hall!With Gen Con 2025 only a few days away, I finally went through BGG's Gen Con 2025 Preview — all 613 items! — and tagged all of the items as Must Have, Interested, Undecided, and Not Interested, with 52 items falling into the first three categories.

Yes, here are my picks of Gen Con 2025, with this being a misleading phrase given that I tagged many items as "Not Interested" only because I've already covered them, already bought them, or have a review copy in hand.

Technically I'm not interested in researching these games further or trying them out at the show because I already have access to them — whereas in reality I want to get several of these games back to the table ASAP, such as Gricha German and Corentin Lebrat's Tag Team from Scorpion Masqué. I've played this two-player game three times on a review copy, and it's a tasty challenge.

To set up, you take two of the twelve characters as your team, placing the starting card from each character's deck into a play deck in the order of your choice. (You have only a two-card deck, so you have two options.)

Each of you reveals and resolves your top card, then you do the same for your bottom card, then you head to the deck-building phase. Shuffle the remaining cards for your two characters, draw three, choose one, return the other two to the bottom of the pile, then add your chosen card to your deck — without changing the order of the cards already in it.

That last element is Tag Team's frisson: You know the order of your opponent's deck. Can you add this new card in the perfect spot to take advantage of what you already have planned, while also surprising your opponent?

In all three games, I was Bödvar the Bearserker and Wong Fei-Hung. The former gains rage over the course of the game, then turns into a bear, and his cards mostly do one thing when he's Bödvar and another when he's a bear, so you want to flip him to get powerful attacks, but must survive long enough to do so. The latter character has a two-stage attack process that does damage equal to the defender's own power, but he can also share power with his partner, then make his power match his partner's.


This is one of the suggested teams for first-time players, and you immediately see how you can use them together — but then playing the game is another matter since you're adding cards somewhat at random. What is the opponent doing? Is just one of your characters being attacked repeatedly? Can you heal them or throw the other character into the fray instead?

You want to keep adding only one character's cards to your play deck because you'll boost them more quickly — pumping Bödvar's rage or enabling Wong Fei-Hung power growth — but the more you add them to your deck, the more of a target they are for attacks. Each choice carries over into future rounds, similar to how Challengers! handles deck-building, but the fixed order of your deck is an additional neat challenge/feature.

We played three games in a row, keeping the same characters each time, adapting in the subsequent game based on what happened previously. Tag Team is a potato-chip game in that you want to play again immediately to see how things work out next time.

Tag Team is one of more than twenty games that I discuss in the video below, some in more length than others. I talk about my five top picks, cover another dozen or so games that I'm curious to check out, then briefly run through another dozen games that I've had on hand. Maybe it will be of interest, whether or not you'll be heading to Indianapolis.

Feel free to share a link to your picks for Gen Con 2025. Tag one or more games, then click "View My TK Titles". That button automatically generates a link that features all of your Must Have, Interested, and Undecided picks. The collated thumb counts are somewhat useful, but I find the individual picks more interesting since they embody one person's perspective, akin to GeekBuddy recommendations. If I already like or am curious about a couple of games on your list, but don't know about others, then I know I should check out those others! Please share!

Youtube Video